sports

Marco in Motion

The online edition of Australia’s paper, The Age, reports on research inspired by Australian sociologist R. W. Connell, examining why some women are drawn to ‘footballers’ — otherwise known as soccer players to those of us stateside. The article proposes that women’s attraction to footballers is “far deeper than the mere lure of sinew and tiny shorts” suggesting a link to the Freudian concept of cathexis. Freud’s idea was adapted to explain gender order by Connell and has inspired another Australian researcher, Nikki Wedgewood, to investigate this concept in her work on sports. This recent research from Wedgewood, who works as a research fellow in the University of Syney’s health sciences program, will be published in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Sport & Social Issues. In this article, Wedgewood argues that “it is the embodiment of male power and ‘hegemonic masculinity’ that sexually attracts some women to elite footballers.”

The Age reports

It’s not accidental who we fall in love with and who we’re attracted to, and especially where you’re talking about elite athletes,” [Wedgewood] said. “It’s not as simple as women wanting to be associated with glamour and money and get that vicarious fame, although that can play a role as well, but there’s something even deeper than that.”

Read more. 

 

Sports journalist Dave Zirin has a weekly radio show on XM Channel 167 every Saturday at noon (Eastern time). Zirin has started a regular segment called “Ask A Sports Sociologist.” So far he’s had two sociologists as guests:

You can hear Zirin’s show online here.

Note for Non-Windows users: the files are in WMA format. If you’re on a Mac, just download and install either Perian or Flip4Mac (both are free) and you’ll be able to use QuickTime to hear them. If you’re on Linux, you’ll have to install your distribution’s restricted format packages. For example, instructions for Ubuntu users.

After reviewing an ESPN report on the hometowns of professional basketball players, demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution concluded that the “NBA is much more of a suburban population than most would have thought.” The average player hails from a city that is 59% white, which is significantly lower than the nation as a whole. On other dimensions, however, NBA players’ hometowns are quite comparable to U.S. averages: their average population is 112,017, 79% of their adult residents have a high school degree, and their average income is $38,127. Professor Frey concludes, “there’s a broad spectrum of areas the players come from, and a significant number come from white, middle class suburbs.”

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A New York Times article on the recent steroid scandals among professional baseball players seeks explanations from sociologists as to the nature of male friendships and the implications for those bonds when trainers testifying against players. Evoking Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, this depiction of male friendship benefits from a sociological perspective.

“‘These are moments when there’s a clash between two conflicting values connected to masculinity,’ said Michael S. Kimmel, a sociologist at State University of New York at Stony Brook and author of ‘The Gendered Society.’ ‘No. 1, you always do the right thing. And the second is, you never betray your friends.’”

“’There’s a tendency to protect a teammate or the organization, even at the expense of higher moral principles,’ said Faye L. Wachs, a professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona who specializes in sports sociology.”